Social Stratification and Educational Choices

Social Mobility and the Educational Choices of Asian Americans*

Understanding Educational and Occupational Choices

I am delighted to write the commentary for this very rich set of papers. It is wonderful to have such a diverse set of papers together in one volume. When I began my work on this topic in the mid 1970s, the focus in the field was entirely on the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the theoretical tools were quite limited, and the scholars were all ...

Social Stratification

The expression ‘social stratification’ refers to the positions held by individuals and groups in the structures of inequality existing in a society. Specifically, it denotes the classification of individuals and groups into different categories on the basis of the amount of one or more privileges enjoyed by the members of each category and/or the intensity of power that they are able to exert o...

Social Stratification

Educational Choices and Social Interactions: a Formal Model and a Computational Test

In their authoritative literature review, Breen and Jonsson (2005) claim that ‘one of the most significant trends in the study of inequalities in educational attainment in the past decade has been the resurgence of rational-choice models focusing on educational decision making’. The starting point of the present contribution is that these models have largely ignored the explanatory relevance of...